Kassandra Lamb's Blog, page 27
July 1, 2019
Overachiever Angst! (And a New Release)
by Kassandra Lamb
One of the joys of being an indie author is that you set your own deadlines; one of the pitfalls is that you set your own deadlines. Or at least, it’s a pitfall for recovering overachievers like myself, who are struggling to ward off “overachiever angst” and maintain some semblance of balance in our lives.
Meme created with imgflip.com I fell into the pit this year. In early January, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that I could finish the Kate Huntington novel I was dra...
June 24, 2019
Who Are The Guppies? (plus New Releases)
by Vinnie Hansen
If you are a long-term reader of mysteries, you’ve probably heard of Sisters In Crime, but have you ever heard of a special chapter of SinC, called The Guppies?
So who are the Guppies? …Organizations for crime writers abound. Sisters in Crime (SinC) is one of the most well-known, with chapters across the United States. I belong to the Northern California Chapter.
In spite of wide-spread chapters, writers can still face obstacles to active participation. Many chapters draw fro...
June 17, 2019
Tea and Tarot… and Murder
by Kirsten Weiss
The introduction of my new Tea and Tarot cozy mystery series led to the other authors at misterio press asking me about Tarot readings… how do they work, what do some of the cards mean?
Tarot cards, with their mysterious archetypal images, frequently turn up in books and movies. Let’s face it, with cards like Death and the Devil, throwing a Tarot card down on a table can be a great way to build suspense.
Tarot cards with the Death card (image from Pixabay) But those two cards...
June 4, 2019
The Great Oxford Comma Debacle of 2019 (PLUS a New Release!)
If you’ve written anything in the last 35 years, you may have gotten conflicting advice about the necessity of using certain commas. The Oxford comma has been the subject of great debate during this time (I kid you not!) with people standing firmly in one of two camps.
What The Heck is An Oxford Comma and Who Cares?
The Oxford comma, sometimes called the serial comma, is the punctuation that occurs just before a coordinating conjunction in a series of three or more items.
Huh?
For example,...
May 28, 2019
An “Off” Week Memorial Day Re-Run: A Pacifist’s Thank You to the Military
by Kassandra Lamb
This is an “off” week for our blog, but in honor of Memorial Day yesterday, I’m rerunning one of my favorite Memorial Day posts.
(Note: the following are the opinions of this author and do not necessarily reflect those of the other misterio press authors.)
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a pacifist by nature. I abhor violence. But unfortunately in the real world there are some evil people, and even more people who are willing to do evil things in order to achieve their goals....
May 20, 2019
A Crime Writer Interview: Elena Hartwell
Today, we are pleased to introduce you all to another crime writer whose work we thought you might like. Please help us welcome Elena Hartwell to the blog!
Elena spent more than twenty years in the theater, before shifting her storytelling over to fiction. She writes the Eddie Shoes Mystery Series. Her next novel, Resurrection Lake, will be out in early 2020 with Crooked Lane Books under the name Elena Taylor.
Kass Lamb (on behalf of the misterio gang): Let’s start with a “tell us about you...
May 13, 2019
What to Do When Anxiety Takes Over Your Life (Plus a New Release)
by Kassandra Lamb
If you’re someone who has been dealing with an anxiety disorder for some time, you probably know as much or more about them than I do. But perhaps this post will offer some useful tidbits. If you’re newly diagnosed and/or finally focusing on how one or more of these disorders is controlling your life, this will provide an overview of what to do when anxiety takes over.
The Gold Standard of TreatmentOnly two types of anxiety disorder are curable at this point in the history...
May 6, 2019
Where My Research Takes Me: Rare Book Reading Room, Library of Congress
Main Reading Room, Library of Congress. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith. Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.
by K.B. Owen
All kinds of decisions (and a hundred indecisions, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot) go into the plotting of a mystery. For example, as I was deciding upon the plot points for UNSEEMLY FATE, book 7 of the Concordia Wells Mysteries, I knew I needed a rare literary artifact that would be compatible with the lady professor’s interests (primarily Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Romant...
April 29, 2019
“Off” Week Goodies for You
A couple little goodies for you today—two posts aimed at writers, but they have a lot of good stuff in them for everyone. One is by me and the other is by a writing coach and teacher, Lisa Hall-Wilson.
Her excellent discussion on shame, what it is and how to write about it, is on the blog, Writers in the Storm. Check it out: The 3-Act Emotional Arc for Showing Shame in Fiction.
The other post, by me, is about using writing to heal emotional wounds. One doesn’t have to be a fiction writer to...
April 22, 2019
When Anxiety Is a Bad Thing, Part I
by Kassandra Lamb
Last month, I posted about how a controllable amount of anxiety can be a good thing when performing. It can keep us on our toes and animate our performance. But what happens when it’s not controllable? Then, anxiety is a bad thing.
Street art on the island of Uto, Finland (Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash) Basically, this happens when our survival mechanisms go awry. One of these survival mechanism is our fight or flight response.
When we perceive a threat in our...
